SLEPT ON:
Rob Walker’s final Consumed column, in which he discusses “online projects devoted exclusively to lovely photographs of carefully arranged groups of objects”:
And then there’s the way this stuff is arranged. There’s certainly nothing naturalistic about it; these are practically inventories. It has become a cliché to talk of “curation” as the great skill of the info-saturated online world, but probably what matters here is the overt display of that skill — the de facto announcement that someone is in charge. After too many years when stuff seemed to rule many lives, these things have been culled, sorted and mastered.
Best of all, we don’t even have to deal with these collections as physical things; we can simply enjoy them as digital presentations. It is everything we love about stuff — but without the stuff. In a reversal of the desire to have your cake and eat it too, we can consume these lovely objects and not-have them, too.
Sometimes I grow tired of these kinds of sites—so twee, so impossibly organized, so relentless—but I’m still fascinated by the impulse behind them.
Via things.
